what a woman who could have joined the D.A.R. has learned about the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" by just paying attention and NOT keeping her mouth shut...

Friday, August 03, 2018

Workers Work and Sometimes Die to Make the Bosses Rich

As incarcerated citizens make plans to initiate a worker's strike from sea to shining sea in the United States on August 21st (the day George Jackson was shot to death by guards in San Quentin in 1971), the Southern Poverty Law Center has released a night-marish report concerning the use -- and abuse -- of immigrants and incarcerated workers at chicken processing plants.

I first learned about the chicken processing industry because there's a plant near the small town where I live and I was talking to a guy who had gone to work there when he was released after doing 28 years in the Louisiana Department of Corrections for a $74 robbery. He explained what it was like to work there and by the time he finished telling me about standing in guts, blood, and slime; about being pressed to work rapid fire with sharp knives; about the Mexicans who were not allowed to speak to anyone else and were whisked away on a bus somewhere at 5 pm, I was stunned.

"That's not a job," I said. "It's a sentence."

"Pretty much," he responded.

And the next day, I saw a photo in the paper of a broadly smiling blonde (representing the family who owns the plant) handing a check to a local charity. Hmmmm....

So when I saw the SPLC article I'm re-posting today, I wasn't surprised that the prison-industrial complex has started skipping the part about waiting until people are released. Why bother? If it's good enough for Victoria Secret and Starbucks, why should chicken processing plants not climb on the gravy train?

Frank Dwayne Ellington set out toward
Ashland, Alabama, on Oct. 29, 2017, headed to the only place he could go: to
work. He rode through a region bounded by the Talladega National Forest to the
north and Lake Martin to the south. It’s an area like many others in rural
Alabama, where a poultry plant is one of the largest employers for miles.

His destination was a spot near the Kill Line at Koch Foods of
Ashland’s poultry plant, where machines slaughter thousands of chickens every
day.

It was Sunday, which meant the plant was operating with a
skeleton crew. Ellington and five others – all fellow prisoners in a work
release program – arrived at the factory to join them. His job was to clean the
plant on the sanitation shift. In the late afternoon, Ellington approached a
machine called an Automatic Rehanger with his rag and bucket. On other shifts,
the machine transfers chicken carcasses from one stage of processing to
another.

The machine was running, but Ellington
began to clean it anyway.

At 4:15 p.m., he made a right angle with
his left arm and reached into the machine to scrub it down. His arm was close
to a rotating toothed disc called a sunflower wheel. Too close. In an instant,
the wheel’s teeth gashed into his forearm and caught on. Ellington screamed. The
machine pulled him into its maw of stainless steel. He died immediately.

Shortly after, two local police officers
showed up to survey the scene. Their photos show Ellington’s body draped
backwards over dull grey metal. He was wearing a white protective jacket and
jeans. One of his blue-gloved hands was limp by his side, the other above his
head, caught on the sunflower wheel. His feet were together, the heels of his
black boots several inches from the ground.The
machine had crushed the back left side of his skull. His bucket lay beside him,
tipped over, near pools of his blood.

The officers
interviewed employees, trying to understand why the accident happened. They
were told the machinery was supposed to be turned off for cleaning.

“I’m surprised there isn’t
some kind of wrongful death lawsuit,” Ashland Police Chief Joseph Stanford said
during an interview six months later, in April. “You would expect it.”

But there is no such
lawsuit against the company. There is only a proposed fine of $38,802, the result
of a federal investigation that concluded Ellington, like other employees,
wasn’t properly trained to recognize the dangers of his job.

Koch Foods (not
affiliated with Koch Industries) is contesting the fine. The company has asked
a court to determine whether it should pay workers’ compensation to Ellington’s
heirs and dependents, including his 14-year-old daughter. It already paid
Ellington’s funeral and burial expenses, according to a court filing.

Meanwhile, nothing
appears to have changed within the work release program that placed Ellington
in the poultry plant. The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) continues to
send hundreds of prisoners to work for private companies, generating nearly $11
million a year for the perennially underfunded agency.

And, though they’re
among the nation’s most dangerous workplaces, poultry plants in Alabama and
other states in the chicken belt continue to benefit from what is perhaps the
most vulnerable workforce in the country – prisoners. Poultry processors employ
them by the hundreds, an investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC) has found. Records reviewed by the SPLC show dozens of poultry companies
employed more than 600 prisoners in at least seven states in 2016. The SPLC
investigation also turned up documents from Georgia and North Carolina showing
at least two dozen prisoners have been injured at their poultry jobs since
2015.

An opportunity

Ellington, 33, was
known as “Solo” to other prisoners. The African-American man from Birmingham
was quiet. He kept to himself and was “polite to staff,” his case officer
wrote.

Work release might
have seemed like a sort of safe haven for Ellington. Living in a work release
center and going to work some days was better than spending all his time in one
of Alabama’s violent, vastly overcrowded prisons. Assaults, murders and
suicides are far less common in work release facilities than in ADOC’s medium-
and maximum-security facilities.

And, work release
might have led, eventually, to parole.

He had pleaded guilty
to theft in 2003 and armed robbery charges in 2004 and 2010. After the last
charge, the state threatened to put him in prison for life without parole. So he
pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a life sentence with the
chance to live in the free world again. By June 2017, when he started working
at Koch Foods, he had completed six prison therapy courses.

Work release was his
path forward.

“The program is
designed to assist you in preparing for release,” reads a prisoner handbook.
Indeed, experience in a work release program can help a prisoner show a parole
board that he or she has been rehabilitated. The programs can also reduce
recidivism among prisoners who committed economically motivated crimes,
according to a 2007 study.

So Ellington became
one of more than 1,000 prisoners in Alabama’s work release program. The
majority are black, as is the overall prison population. The incarceration rate
for black Alabamians is about three times the rate for white Alabamians.

The state generates significant revenue
from their work.

The prisoners are paid at least the
minimum wage by their private employers. ADOC collects their pay for them,
taking 40 percent off the top, then even more for any court debt, restitution
or child support owed by the prisoner. For Ellington, that was an additional 25
percent. His average weekly wage was $323.26, according to a court filing –
below average for a prisoner on work release.

After the fees and taxes, very little is
left for prisoners to spend or save. In fiscal year 2012, the last year for
which the state has provided data, Alabama’s work release prisoners
collectively were paid $25 million. ADOC ultimately disbursed $3.3 million to
them – just more than 13 cents of every dollar they earned.

Over the past five years, the state has
netted, on average, nearly $11 million per year. In 2017, the year Ellington
was killed, ADOC’s $9.7 million in revenue from work release represented about
2.4 percent of its total funding.

Employers, meanwhile, can take advantage of an extra financial
incentive. Through an on-the-job training program overseen by the Alabama
Department of Commerce, they can be reimbursed for 50 to 75 percent of a
worker’s pay in return for training them for a period of six to 26 weeks.
Ellington was not a participant in such a program, according to a state
official, but the programs do sometimes include prisoners.

The company Ellington worked for is
owned by a man named Joseph Grendys, a self-made billionaire who
transformed the small family company where he worked – a one-room shop with 13
employees – into one of the largest poultry processors in the country. Based in
Park Ridge, Illinois, Koch Foods has estimated revenues of more than $3 billion
a year.

The company has four processing plants
in Alabama.

Chicken is the true king here in the
erstwhile land of cotton. Known as “broilers,” chickens intended for the table
are by far the state’s No. 1 agricultural commodity, generating nearly 90,000
jobs on farms, processing plants and related enterprises. More than 1 billion
are raised in the state each year, and dozens of industrial-size processing
plants dot the landscape, slicing and dicing them into a panoply of products
destined for grocery stores and fast-food joints – like the popcorn chicken,
strips and “chicken fries” churned out by Koch’s plants. In Alabama, Winn-Dixie
stores often stock Koch’s products.

The processing industry thrives on not
only the close proximity to chicken farms but also the cheap labor found here –
immigrant labor in particular. The processing lines at many plants are staffed
by recent immigrants from Latin American countries. The National Council of La
Raza estimates that, nationwide, one-third of all poultry processing jobs are
held by Latinos, many of them undocumented.

They comprise an extremely vulnerable
workforce, one that has little or no leverage to bargain for better conditions
or wages. If undocumented workers speak out, they risk being turned over to
federal agents for deportation. A 2011 survey of 302 poultry workers in
Alabama, conducted by the SPLC and Alabama Appleseed, indicates that coercion
works to keep workers silent. Two-thirds of the respondents in the survey
believed their co-workers were scared or reluctant to report injuries, for
example.

But companies might look beyond the
undocumented immigrant labor pool for several reasons. First, immigration raids
can be devastating not only for immigrant communities but for the companies
themselves. In 2007, Koch Foods was caught having hired 161 undocumented
immigrants at a plant in Ohio. The workers were arrested, and the company was
fined $536,000.

Immigrants might also
choose to leave an area to look for better work, higher pay or a better life
somewhere else. The foreign-born, noncitizen population in Ashland, for
instance, fell from about 300 in 2011 to about 216 in 2016. It’s not clear what
led to the exodus, though many farmers in the state reported labor shortages in
2011 after the Alabama Legislature enacted HB 56, the most draconian
anti-immigrant law in the country.

Prisoners are arguably
even more vulnerable workers than undocumented immigrants. They won’t get
arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but they can be sent back to
prison, and they can’t move away. They also can’t find a higher-paying job
elsewhere. They are a captive workforce and a prime target for poultry
companies.

Some of the states
that produce the most chickens – including Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina
– also have large work release labor pools, records show.

North Carolina’s work
release population was 1,182 in fiscal year 2016. Prisoners in that state
worked for at least four poultry and sanitation companies, records show. In
Georgia, 2,624 people lived in transitional work centers in fiscal year 2017.
Records obtained by the SPLC showed at least 265 were employed at Georgia
poultry plants around February 2016. That same year, in Delaware, poultry
companies employed 261 prisoners of the state’s 573 work release prisoners.

And in Alabama, there
are 10 work release centers. Koch Foods of Ashland can draw from the one in
nearby Alexander City, which has a pool of about 140 prisoners.

Ellington was one of
them.

Sharp blades, slippery floors

In poultry plants,
chickens are decapitated, drained of blood, scalded of their feathers and
deboned. The carcasses are then chilled and “rehanged,” or fastened to the
conveyor carrying them down the line. Thousands of birds are processed per day.
To prevent harm to themselves and others, workers must stay mindful of sharp
tools, slippery floors, noisy machinery, chicken waste and potentially
hazardous sanitation chemicals.

On top of these
dangers, workers are pressured by their supervisors to avoid slowing down the
production line. For example, they’re discouraged from using the bathroom at
work – and fear they’ll be fired if they raise concerns about it, according to
a 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. When workers are
denied or delayed bathroom access, they can develop “urinary tract infections,
constipation, abdominal pain and hemorrhoids,” according to the report.
Meanwhile, the industry has lobbied the U.S. Department of Agriculture for
nearly a decade to do away with the line speed limit, which now stands at an
already punishing 140 birds per minute.

Under those
conditions, workers can’t always stay safe. The survey by the SPLC and
Appleseed found that 72 percent of respondents suffered significant
work-related injury or illness. Seventeen percent of the workers using sharp
tools “suffered a cut serious enough to require some medical attention.” Among
sanitation workers like Ellington, who have the most exposure to chemicals, 30
percent of respondents said they experienced respiratory problems. The injury
rate in the poultry industry is nearly twice the national average for all
workplaces. Poultry workers also fall ill at six times the rate of the average
American worker.

Nationwide, OSHA has
opened 167 investigations into accidents at poultry plants since 2015. Eight of
those were prompted by deaths, including Ellington’s. A worker in Murrayville,
Georgia, was fatally electrocuted in 2016. A worker in Nixon, Texas, was killed
by chlorine inhalation in 2017. Details were sparse in two cases: A worker in
Orange Cove, California, was crushed to death in 2015 and another was “struck”
by something in Robards, Kentucky, in 2017. OSHA withheld details of the
accident in the remaining four cases. Hospitalizations spurred 140 of the
investigations. In those cases, workers lost fingers, toes, arms and hands to
amputations.

There were at least 24
incidents in which prisoners on work release were hurt at poultry plants in
Georgia and North Carolina since 2015, according to prison officials’ emails
obtained by the SPLC through open records requests.

Some were working in
sanitation jobs like Ellington. Others worked on the line. They were cut by
knives and burned with chemicals on their skin and in their eyes. They also
reported pain in their hands – a symptom of the kinds of musculoskeletal
disorders that frequently afflict poultry workers.

Managers know they
wield a powerful cudgel over work release prisoners who complain about safety
or health concerns: the threat of sending them back to prison.

In Marietta, Georgia,
when two workers at Tip Top Poultry complained of pain, the manager emailed a
prison official: “Can I get rid of them and get people from the center willing
to work?” Near Atlanta, a prisoner complained about pain in her hands and asked
to be moved to a different department. Emails show the safety manager asked her
not to come back at all.

The emails also reveal
reluctance at times to properly address injuries. In Valdosta, Georgia, a
supervisor for a sanitation company working for Pilgrim’s Pride instructed
prison officials to wash a returning worker in cold water. He had reported
itching, possibly from chemical exposure. “We don’t need another hospital
visit,” the supervisor wrote.

In North Carolina,
four prisoners employed by a sanitation contractor for Case Farms called
Cal-Clean suffered severe injuries in 2016. Prison officials discussed the
incident in emails under the subject line: “inmates from sanitation with
chemical burns.” Three workers had returned to the prison facility in Morganton
with first-degree burns and irritation on their legs and groins. The workers
“reported to me that Cal-Clean refused to send them to the doctor to be
evaluated,” one official wrote to her colleagues. Instead, the plant supervisor
gave them diaper rash cream. A fourth worker with burns was “still at work at
this time,” the official wrote.A North Carolina Department of
Labor probe into the incident confirmed that the workers received only diaper
rash cream for their injuries, but found no violations of labor laws.

All the while, the
poultry industry’s demand for work release labor remained high. Many of the
emails obtained from Georgia and North Carolina reflected requests by companies
for more workers. As one Georgia sanitation contractor added to an urgent
request for 10 more men: “We need sure and dependable bodies.”

In Ashland, two agents
with ADOC’s Investigation and Intelligence Division arrived at the plant
shortly after the county coroner removed Ellington’s body. They found machinery
and floors covered in blood. No one directly witnessed Ellington’s death, but
the agents set about interviewing several employees to piece together what led
to the accident.

The agents first
learned that Koch Foods of Ashland had been employing prisoners for over a
year. One of the other five prisoners at the plant that day told them “inmate
workers weren’t treated the same as free-world workers” and “they were given
the worst jobs.” The company employed 20 prisoners on every shift throughout the
week. Critically, a plant supervisor told the agents that on weekdays,
Ellington had several other prisoners with him as he cleaned the Automatic
Rehanger. On Sundays he had to do the job alone.

It is unclear whether
Ellington was under pressure to avoid slowing down the plant, as poultry
employees often are. However, a plant supervisor told investigators that “it’s
possible that inmate Ellington could have left the machine running to save time
in the cleaning process,” the agents wrote in their report. Another employee
told them “it was common for everyone to take shortcuts when cleaning the
machines.” The one Ellington was cleaning “should have been shut down,” the
employee said.

OSHA examined
Ellington’s case for nearly six months. Its inspectors found that “authorized
employee(s) did not receive training in the recognition of applicable hazardous
energy sources.” One of OSHA’s proposed citations, released in April, laid a
serious issue bare. “Employees who clean, service, and maintain the Meyn
Automatic Rehang Machines between the Kill line and Evisceration Lines 1 and 2
had not received training on where to apply the three locks on the electrical
breakers in order to ensure energy isolation,” it reads. In other words,
Ellington and others might not have known how to correctly turn off or slow
down the machines for cleaning.

OSHA proposed another
citation for Koch Foods of Ashland’s lack of a procedure to “control
potentially hazardous energy” during cleaning and servicing. The company is
contesting all of the proposed citations. But it had seen this one before. OSHA
had proposed citing it for the same problem – at the same plant – nearly 10
years ago. In that case, Koch Foods of Ashland reached a settlement with OSHA
to delete the citation, though it stayed visible in OSHA’s public record. The
company did, however, take a penalty of $2,000 for violating the general
standard that employers must provide a workplace free of “recognized hazards
that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”

There were, then,
several red flags concerning the work that prisoners did at Koch Foods of
Ashland.

Should ADOC have known
about these issues before allowing Koch Foods of Ashland to hire people through
work release? Did the department verify that Ellington had the necessary
training to keep him safe? Those questions were among more than three dozen
sent to an ADOC spokesman by the SPLC in June. The spokesman refused to answer
the questions outright. He incorrectly advised the SPLC that to get answers, a
public records request must be filed. The SPLC had already filed a request for
records relating to Ellington’s death. ADOC failed to fulfill that request for
more than seven months.

An attorney for Koch
Foods of Ashland declined to comment for this piece, citing ongoing
investigations. Phone calls, online messages and letters to Ellington’s family
were not returned.

Ellington did mention
his mother in one document, however. It was his work agreement, signed in June
2017. He declared when he started working that in the event of his death, she
was to receive his accrued pay. But there was a catch – all of Ellington’s
court debts had to be paid off first.

He never managed that,
even with 25 percent of his earnings earmarked for the effort. Ellington owed about
$4,800 in court debt on the day of the accident. Months later, the court
received his final payment of $129 – so little as to barely make a dent in the
debt, much less leave something for his mother.

NOTE: SPLC
Senior Supervising Attorney Kristi Graunke, Co-Director of Community Advocacy
Emily Martin and students with the Cornell Law School Farmworker Legal
Assistance Clinic contributed to this report. An attorney from the National
Center for Law and Economic Justice also provided support.

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ABOUT ME

I'm a writer, speaker, and sociologist who's made a life's work out of explaining exactly what I see happening in the world. Some people like it. Some people don't. But the ball is still the ball, no matter what kind of spin is put on it.